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Hapo57 — Orthia
#aph #hetalia #hetaliaancients #ancientalia #femsparta #aphlaconia #aphsparta
Published: 2014-11-01 01:40:31 +0000 UTC; Views: 637; Favourites: 6; Downloads: 5
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Description
Here are young Laconia and Sparta with masks from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. It was an effort to do something Halloween-y although as far as we know these masks have nothing to do with Halloween (not that we know what they’re for)
I wrote a paper and did a presentation on the site. My focus wasn’t on the masks but I did mention them briefly to explain that scholarship on these masks tends to unanimously assume they were only worn by men for some reason… which is ridiculous to me given that they were a found at a temple to a goddess who is associated with guiding girls into womanhood and protecting women during childbirth. There is nothing obviously gender specific about these masks beyond what the scholarship enforces. but yeah i got an A on that project you can trust me xD
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Comments: 2
I find it really interesting to see Sparta smiling, that's such a rare occurrence that when I first saw this picture, I was surprised to find that the smiling guy was Sparta. 
Alas the field of archaeology is often filled with grouchy men who think that anything and everything revolves around men. Even when it seems rather unlikely, such as this case. How do you conclude that men must have worn the masks when it was found in a strongly female environment? That's really not good archaeological work when you assume something and don't support it with evidence. Saying that women wore those masks due to the kind of temple they were found in and associated with that kind goddess would make so much more sense... I mean it's still an assumption but at least it's backed up with evidence? It has a higher chance of being an accurate assumption tbh.
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Yesss I thought "I never draw him smiling, what makes him happy?" and celebrating his own traditions at home seemed to be the right answer. xD
The archaeology is, like much classical archaeology, based upon trying to find proof to back up a text. The famous story about this particular temple is the Spartan tradition of whipping boys in front of the temple and having them race, a tradition that the Romans turned into a spectator sport for tourists in Sparta (much to the chagrin of the Spartans, I imagine). Everyone thinks they're going to be the next Heinrich Schliemann and find archaeological proof for the story, haha. They fail to consider other factors and ignore any evidence that doesn't fit the tale.
The story about the masks was that supposedly people would wear them at festivals and perform lewd dances- but in scholarship they're always men performing for some reason. The young women, according to scholars, might be secluded from view to perform their own rituals based on the idea that often in Spartan mythology young maidens were abducted from temples to Artemis. I don't really see why this particular viewpoint trumps all others, but there you have it xD;
The sad thing is early archaeologists also have a tendency not to catalogue whatever they don't see as important and a lot of context gets lost, so all we have sometimes are stories (and since the Spartans didn't write much, we have a lot of Athenian stories saying things like "oh those spartans having wild orgies all the time and the women run the government because the men are too stupid" etc).
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